Many use free Google, Yahoo, Microsoft email accounts; I would trust them about the same as a government provided service. Microsoft especially has a proven track record of garbage security posture.

Importantly, we need to be mindful of the lowest common denominator citizen who might have nothing but still be entitled to government services. Governments exist to service their constituents. The USPS is required to serve every US address (including mail delivery by mule into the Grand Canyon) [1], it is straightforward to provide ~1GB of email to everyone who needs it.

[1] https://about.usps.com/who/profile/

You give them (illegally interconnected federal agencies) your regular accounts so you can be stalked by a sexual deviant in the NSA?

Why wouldn't you. If youve ever used fema for disaster relief the info they require is quite invasive. These are also the same people you send your tax returns to. The same people your bank gives your AML info to.

Youre going to begrudge them an email account they host for ease of communicating with these same people?

Corporations get away with a lot precisely because they're not the government. That’s the trick: shift functions out of the state and into private enterprise, and suddenly the protections that would have applied no longer do. Every "free speech" thread eventually devolves into the same conclusion: the First Amendment only binds the government.

So the threat model isn't uniform. There's no one-size-fits-all. Depending on how you assess risk, you might reasonably conclude that government services pose less danger than private actors, and someone else might see the inverse.

I would use it in that I would forward the email off to my own server, the same as the rest of my ancillary email addresses. But the alternative pointed to in the article is freaking Hotmail - right into the open arms of the surveillance industry. And that account will likely be forgotten about once the immediate problem is over, making any continuity or later contact moot. [0]

In the abstract, email is actually a much better communication of last resort. A phone number requires you to maintain that phone number for the voice mailbox, or even be immediately reachable for more complex communication that can't be left in a voicemail. Whereas email just sits there until you can check it from many places, and the cost of maintaining an account is effectively ~zero.

And here we're talking about FEMA staff facilitating disaster victims. They could certainly have electronic devices to facilitate people checking their government mailboxes a lot easier than they could facilitate the same with phones. There could be terminals in post offices as well, for when the immediate disaster relief has gone away but someone still can't/won't have their own Internet access.

[0] fun fact: I tag senders using a wildcard character in the address, for example x-somebusiness@mydomain. When I give this style of email out over the phone, I invariably get responses of "you need a real email address", for which I have to explain my scheme and assure them that that is indeed my real email address (at least as far as they are concerned). To me this indicates that there is still a large contingent of people making up "email addresses" on the spot when asked, with no intention of ever receiving email - ie "Email address? Oh uh, John Smith At Google?"

(and yeah I know I could reduce the friction there by making the unique identifier into a nonce or other non-plaintext, and then keeping a mapping. alas, this hasn't really been a priority)